Last night I wrote: “we have come, rightly, to trust the foods that nourished and nurtured those who came before us.”

This essential trust is now being eroded by an ethos of secrecy and a kind of Orwellian doublespeak promoted by commercial food growers and processors. For, in many of our most fundamental foods, we are getting more than what is stated or implied on the packaging; (our farms are increasingly the source of environmental pollutants rather than the exalted repositories of open space so often depicted) a great majority of the commercially produced foods are contaminated with pesticides, increasingly we ingest genetically modified DNA—the health implications of which we know very little about, our commercial meats are grown with growth hormones—and the animals are too often confined in ways that we would not wish on evil itself. And far, far too often, we as consumers know nothing about it. In a revolving door administrations where government regulatory agencies are staffed with executives from the industries they monitor, and government regulators move into high paying jobs in the industries they govern, there has come to be a sense that the general public simply does not need nor has the right to know which is in their food. Food that has been irradiated or grown with G.M. seed stocks, or injected with growth hormones, or that contain residues of pesticides do not have to be labeled as such. I think if there was more honesty, more transparency, in our food supply we, as a nation would have better, cleaner food.